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More people should understand that hospitals are messy.
American hospitals are messy. It gives me no pleasure to uniquely qualify that. The fact is that, the more you read on the topic, the more you will learn that this is an uniquely American thing, at least among the industrialized advanced nations.If you exclude the Cleveland Clinics, Cedar Sinais, Beth Israels & Stanford Meds of the hospital world, most American hospitals are woefully bad for patients, in terms of HAI rates(Hospital Acquired Infections). Buried in a pile of books, surveys and studies during the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) a few years ago, was an eminently readable book called Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed
My Father--and How We Can Fix It by David Goldhill.
In 2007, David Goldhill's father, in good overall health,
checked into the hospital with a minor case of pneumonia.
Within a few days, he developed sepsis, then a wave of
secondary infections. A few weeks after entering the
hospital and the day after his 83rd birthday, he died.Here's an Atlantic piece by Mr. Goldhill http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer... A Reason TV discussion with him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvSa9nC4JcQ I think his points are still relevant, even after the passage of the ACA. In a few years, I am certain that we will have to revisit the issue of how little we get as consumers of healthcare in America, for how much we spend as a nation, all over again. |
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327766/Mid-Stafford...
1200 dead because of avoidable cleanliness problems